


Maybe so

by SharkEnthusiast



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abused Sirius Black, Bisexual Sirius Black, Gen, M/M, Minor Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, Sad Sirius Black, Sirius Black Being an Asshole, Sirius Black as Padfoot, Young Sirius Black
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-07-25 20:50:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20032144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharkEnthusiast/pseuds/SharkEnthusiast
Summary: Sirius Black does not want to go back to Hogwarts and smile and laugh and flirt and fight and be everything everyone has always wanted to be.





	1. Sirius

**Author's Note:**

> I am terrible human being for writing this. Oh dear.  
This fandom is long dead and I am not quite sure I approve of Jk Rowling but it’s written and so I’m posting it.

Sometimes Sirius Black throbs. 

(Because he is 15 and young.) (Too young to be the throbbing like this)

He does not want to go back to Hogwarts and smile and laugh and flirt and fight and be everything everyone has always wanted to be.

He wants to hurt and ache and throb and he wants to  _ sit in it, _ because the terrible, sad, twisted part of him thinks it feels good. 

He doesn’t want to stay at home either. He does not want his mother’s screaming and his father's anger and he doesn’t want Regulus’s disappointed gaze. 

He wants to get out.  _ He needs to. _ He needs to because in that fucking house he hurts more than usual and if he stays there his parents will kill him or the other way around. 

He is so, so miserable, and all that misery, stuck inside him, coiling, searing,  _ hurts _ . 

God, he’s miserable and so fucking angry. (He screams at his parents and breaks family heirlooms and sends angry letters to James just because he knows his mother will intercept it. He sneaks out and comes home loud and angry and drunk just to piss off his parents and spits in his mother's face when she slaps him.)

He tells her that he is not scared until his throat hurts and so does the rest of him. (He is. Has been since he was 11 years old, but he would die before he would tell her that.)

A week before his 5th year at Hogwarts his mother roughs him around a little more than he would like, so he grabs his trunk, gets aboard the night bus, and spends the week before school in a dingy room in the Leaky Cauldron. 

It is the best week of his life. 

He eats when he wants to and explores London and meets a muggle boy at a nightclub who tastes like weed and chapstick and  _ life.  _

(The boy asks for his number and Sirius has to explain that he doesn’t have one because his parents are recluse freaks and he goes to a fancy boarding school that doesn’t let students use the phone. He does give him a P.O. box in Hogsmeade though, so he can write Sirius. The boy seems very unhappy with that, but he still promises that he will.) 

Sirius sits in his room and listens to the train roar and feels the bed shake beneath him and finally everything doesn’t ache so much anymore. 

He stays up late and draws all in his school books that used to be Belatrix’s. He buys packs and packs of muggle cigarettes because the ministry tracks who buys the wizard ones as to keep underage smoking to a minimum and smokes until all he can think of is the good things. (Remus and James and Peter and Regulus and Lily and charms class and McGonagall.)

He smokes so he doesn’t throb and then some extra because he likes it. 

He meets James at the platform, who tells him he smells like cigarettes and dust.

Sirius only smiles. 

He likes being the dangerous one. The loose cannon, the loud one, the one that is bound to crash and burn at some point in time.

He says hello to Lily (who still thinks he’s a prat) and Marlene (who Sirius knows has been wanting to shag him since last year) and sits next to Moony on the train. He eats too much sugar and eats even more at the feast, hexes Snape, watches Regulus from the corner of his eye. 

He tilts back in his chair and plans a prank with James. 

He throbs again.

(His mother's voice wails in his head and so does James and Remus’s. His own does too, and he sounds so desperate Sirius wants to remove it with something sharp.) (He opts for cigarettes instead.) 

He smokes and he smokes and he smokes and he still throbs and the worst part about it is that no one even notices. 

He doesn’t want people to, but still. 

Sirius is all off, and James knows it. Remus knows it. Peter, even Marlene McKinnon. 

Sirius is brash laughter and sharp wit and eyes like steel. He is hexes and firewhiskey, ink smudged hands and bruises. 

He is everything that James is. A touch more melodramatic. (A touch more dangerous.) 

Sirius smokes and smokes and smokes until James can hear it in his voice and until he has to stop him from going for another two after the first has burnt down. Sirius let’s the cigarettes burn down to his fingers, and doesn’t even flinch when his skin begins to smoke, too. 

Sirius has fought with his brother too often and goes to hogsmeade and returns with letters and brushes James off and is a little rougher around the edges. He doesn’t cry as much and doesn’t bother trying in McGonagall’s class.

James doesn’t know what is wrong with Sirius anymore. 

(It used to be that Moony didn’t like him back or that he was in Gryffindor or that Marlene McKinnon didn’t get the fucking idea that he wasn’t interested.) 

He doesn’t know what is wrong with Sirius anymore, so he sits with him while he smokes and let’s him copy down James’s notes and stops complaining about Evans so much. 

(Somewhere, James is terrified that he is losing his best mate. Or that his best mate is months away from throwing himself off the astronomy tower or that his best mate has finally joined the dark side after all.)

He still sits with Sirius so he doesn’t sit with himself so much and he still makes Sirius help plan what to do to Snape next. 

“Fuck. I think I’ve gone properly numb.” Sirius days once, drunk off of firewhiskey.

James doesn’t respond. 

Just sits with him while he smokes and steadies his hands when they start to shake.

He might not know what is wrong with Sirius anymore, but that doesn’t really mean anything.

James will still sit with him, no matter what.

“You have to stop smoking, Padfoot.”

“So fucking what, Moony. Not like you actually give a shit.”

Sirius tries to find his star. His constellation.

“What’s up with you lately, mate?”

“What do you mean?”

“I dunno, Sirius. You’re all off.”

“Yeah? Is that right? Might want to be more specific there.”

“You smoke too much.”

“Mmhm. And?”

Sirius eyes are steel and mercury and silver and the moon. 

“I’ve been writing this Muggle recently, Moony.”

“Yeah? That’s why you’re off so much recently?”

“He really fucking good looking, mate. I met him at this club. My parents are going to kill me when they find out.” 

Sirius takes a drag of his cigarette and then drops it out the window. 

“I hope they don’t for my sake and James’s. Reckon he’d go mad if he found you murdered by your parents.”

Remus itches. The full moon is coming up. It happens sometimes.

“My parents are fucking assholes. I think I want to move in with James.”

Remus smiles. A little artificially.

“I think he’d like that.”

“I could move in with you, Moony. That’d be pretty good too. You could show me Muggle things.”

Remus smiles. He tries to imagine Sirius and some boy dancing together, fit together like a puzzle.

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

“Yeah? Me too.”

“Maybe so, then Padfoot.”

“Yeah. Maybe so.”

  
  



	2. Regulus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They are two sides of the same coin.

Regulus watches Sirius.

He looks for him in the halls and in between classes and checks to see if he actually comes down for lunch every day.

He just. Checks in on him.

(Because the last time he saw him he was screaming and yelling and bruised and battered and a ball of anger and sadness and all things bad.)

He cannot get Sirius out of his head. How everything down to his hair is to defy their parents and how he left and might not return. 

(“Come with me.” Sirius says. “We can rent out a room in the leaky cauldron. Just for a bit. Just to see how much better it is not having to be a Black.”)

He wishes he could say that he should have gone.

He imagines Mother, screaming, twice as angry when just Sirius left, crying, wailing. 

Regulus imagines him and Sirius, running into the night. He imagines laughing with him in a dark and dusty room in the leaky cauldron. He imagines Sirius snoring in the chair, hair wild from sleep. He imagines trips to Hogsmeade and Sirius and his many girls and Regulus growing his hair out too so they look identical. Imagines his brother, not Ghaunt from Grimmauld Place.

He imagines his brother, who is less of a Black than Regulus will ever be, but more of one all the same.

He sees him at dinner and decides to ask him about it after all.

“Hello Sirius.”

Sirius turns to face him. James Potter looks at him with an expression Regulus is not quite sure he knows. 

“Hello, Reg.”

It feels all too loud for a moment like this.

Regulus wishes they were alone. 

“I was wondering if you are coming back to Grimmauld Place for the holiday.”

Sirius looks at him, mouth tight. Rigid. There is a parchment on the table that Regulus can only assume is his charms homework. 

“Yes.” Sirius’s Voice is small. Firm and shaky all at the same time.

“Good.” Regulus says. Because he cannot imagine the cold, grey house without Sirius, who is the only good one of them, and because Sirius used to play piano with him and love him like he loves James Potter and the werewolf scum and the blood traitor. 

“Good.” He says, even though he knows that if Sirius goes back his mother might kill him or curse him or break him beyond repair. 

This is the difference between Sirius and Regulus. 

Sirius is fire and laughter and shaky hands and steady voice. He is soaked and filled with blood and he is brave enough to face their parents by themselves.

Regulus has been cowering behind Sirius his whole life, and he does not plan on stopping now.

He needs him. He needs him because without him he will become their father.

Regulus walks back to his table.

  
  



	3. James

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is cliche and for that I’m sorry

James leaves Hogwarts for the summer angry. 

Fuming. 

Angry at Lily Evans and Peter’s never-wavering loyalty. 

Most of all, he’s angry at pea-brained Sirius Black, with his fake laugh and steel eyes and wish for something horrible to happen to him. (If not him, someone else.)

Sirius almost got Snape killed. 

Because Sirius is not only cigarettes and muttering spells under his breath. Not only danger and beauty wrapped into one, a meteor set on crashing onto earth. Sirius is shaky hands and sore throats and fear suppressed by laughter and bottles of butterbeer. Sirius is scared and human and so, so fucked up it nearly pains James to look at him some days. 

Remus could have killed Snape and it was all Sirius’s fault. 

Because no matter how stuck up, how absolutely unfortunate, how set on Lily Snape is, he doesn’t deserve to die. 

He cannot get his own words out of his head. He turns them over and over and over until they’re smooth and until he knows what words he said that made Sirius cry. 

He feels guilty past the anger in his gut. 

James pretends he doesn’t. 

He goes home angry and loud and guilty, but it stifles it all with hexes and chocolate frogs and laughing loud and flirting.

Snape could have died, and Sirius wanted him to. 

Sometimes James wonders if Sirius is just a Black after all. 

Sirius comes whirling into the Potter’s Mansion, sobbing and broken and bleeding at 11 in the morning. James does not recognize him. He looks wild and crazy and terrified. His mother burns herself putting a lemon meringue pie into the oven, and his father startles up from the table, spilling an inkwell onto his new pants. 

Sirius is crying and bleeding and terrified, and so James forgets his anger and replaces it with pity and holds Sirius very carefully as to not break him. 

“They’re going to kill me.” Sirius wails, young and old and shaking and slick with rain and tears and blood.

And because Sirius is scared and human and so, so fucked up it nearly pains James to look at him, he holds him and lets him cry and tells Sirius that he’s okay.

James doesn’t think he is. Walburga Black seems to have knocked something astray this time. 

“They’re going to to kill me.” Sirius says again, heart stuttering quickly in his chest. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, James, I swear to god I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry I’m sorryI’m sorryI’m sorryI’m sorry _ I’m sorry.” _

James best friend is here, trembling in between his arms, scared. James can’t stay mad any longer. 

He wonders if Lily would like Sirius and James better if she knew what shit they go through. 

“It’s okay.” 

James is sure it isn’t, but he pretends it is and isn’t angry and laughs with Sirius the rest of the summer. 

He was wrong. Sirius is not a Black, and he is especially not his mother or Father. And no matter how much he looks like him, he is not Regulus either. 

“You are not your family.” James tells him that summer when Sirius’s eyes get glassy. 

“You are not your family.” James tells him in the Hogwarts dorm, Sirius’s knuckles bloody from a fight with Regulus and the days when Sirius can’t get out of bed.

“You are not your family.” James tells him when they graduate. Sirius’s smile is bigger than the moon.

“You are not your family.” James tells him, legs dangling out the second story window of Lily and James’s newly purchased cottage. Remus is downstairs with Lily, who is startlingly pregnant. Sirius has not given up cigarettes or the long hair or the motorbike. 

Sirius takes a drag of his cigarette, eyes crinkling up at the edges with his smile. 

James is glad Sirius finally believes him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m terribly unhappy with this


End file.
